We spent the last three days examining the life of Maurice Strong, the Canadian tycoon who concocted the global-warming scare as a rationale for subordinating democracies to a UN elite with dramatically enhanced sovereign powers.

One name that popped up briefly in our investigations into Strong’s life was that of his distant relative Anna Louise Strong. We’d never heard of her before, so we decided to find out about her. What we discovered was that she was a useful stooge of the first water.

Born in small-town Nebraska in 1885, the daughter of a Congregational minister and missionary, she attended Bryn Mawr and Oberlin and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago. Moving to Seattle, she became active in local progressive politics and began writing newspaper articles in support of the Russian Revolution, which had just taken place.

In 1921, after attending a lecture about the Russian Revolution by journalist Lincoln Steffens (who was famous for saying about the USSR: “I have seen the future, and it works”), she went to Russia and began writing glowing books about Bolshevism in action. In The First Time in History (1925), which carried a preface by none other than Leon Trotsky, she described Russia as

the only place in the world where I get a feeling of hope and a plan. With hundreds of thousands of people living for that plan and dying for it and going hungry for it, and wasting themselves in inefficient work for it, and finally bringing a little order out of chaos for it. America seems cheerful and inconsequential after it. Europe, – the insane nightmare of Europe, – seems impossible to endure….

In Russia when they speak of the Revolution, they don’t mean one grand and horrible upheaval; that was merely the “October Overturn,” the taking of power. Now comes the using of power to create a new world through the decades.

There have been many revolutions in history, each with its tragic dignity, its cruelties, its power released. But never has there been a great organisation, in control of the economic as well as of the political resources of a nation, planning steadily through the prose of daily life a future embracing many lands and decades, learning from mistakes, changing methods but not aims, controlling press and education and law and industry as tools to its purpose….This is Common Consciousness in action, crude, half-organised and inefficient, but the first time in History.

Strong spent thirty years in Russia, where she pronounced herself “greatly stirred by the building of the first socialist state in the world.” She “wrote hundreds of articles about it and some fifteen books,” and almost annually “went to America to lecture and make contacts with publishers,” invariably stopping “in other countries on the way.”

Her books on Russia, along with articles for such high-profile publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The Nation, made her a pretty big name. She lunched with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She met with Stalin and Molotov. She was a founder of the first English-language paper in Russia, The Moscow News. 

But after years of gushing in print about Soviet Communism, the USSR, for Anna Louise Strong, turned out not to be utopia. That, she found elsewhere. Tune in tomorrow.